X Files Giantess
by Thor2000
Summary: Fox Mulder goes searching for the remains of Nancy Archer, a woman who became a giant after seeing a UFO in “Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman.”
1. Default Chapter

"Mulder, What's with the hole?" The beautiful redheaded FBI Agent looked at her partner. She knew he had been up to something all the way out west like this and digging in a field in Hitchcock, California.

"Scully," He grunted as he dug another foot in the empty field. His head partially bobbed above ground level of his excavating.

"In 1958, Nancy Archer saw an unidentified flying object. Like several other witnesses of the time, no one believed her, but then they had to believe she had seen something as inexplicable radiation on her person caused her to grow fifty feet tall. She terrorized the town in her stupor and died when she got tangled and then electrocuted in the town's electric lines. The military buried her in this field and seized her properties for," He made quotation marks with his fingers, "'Tax evasion.' They then threatened all the witnesses from telling the truth."

"So you're digging up a giant corpse." She sounded skeptical as she once more found herself trying to follow his line if reasoning.

"Nope," Mulder continued digging. "Last year, the military dug her up in 1976 and moved her to places unknown, but they only moved a small truck's worth. Not enough for a woman who had allegedly grown to fifty feet tall. I think they left behind most of her." His shovel hit a rock. He bent down in the darkness barely illuminated by the light of Scully's flashlight and dusted off dirt and loose soil from something he had hit with the shovel. It just looked like he had picked up a large oval rock.

"Looks like she had kidney stones." Scully rolled her eyes and turned away as she returned to her car.

"Scully !" Mulder dropped the rock and climbed out of the hole with the shovel in his hand. Grabbing his jacket from the tree branch where he had hung it up on arrival, he had to run to catch up with her if he was going to get a ride from her. The taxi driver that had dropped him off out here had done so because he knew the field, but he preferred to ride back in to town with her than take a chance with getting stranded out here.

"It's true!" He insisted. "Buried in this field is all the truth of everything we've been looking for. More than one alien race has been in touch with this planet!"

"Mulder, think about it." He hated it when she became logical. "If she was that radioactive, then everything that crossed over her grave from grasshoppers to gophers would turn into giants."

"I've been thinking about that too." He threw the shovel into the trunk and fumbled with his jacket as he got into the car next to her. She started up the car as she glanced to him pulling on his seat belt and pulling on the safety belt. "I'm thinking that this sort of radiation only effects human female estrogen and pre-menstrual levels." He answered.

"Cosmic PMS?" She rolled her eyes again as he continued blathering on about conspiracies and secret covert alien meetings. Her mind was already home and drowning him out as she thought about settling into a foamy bath in her hotel room for the night and maybe watching Letterman. David Duchovny was on the show tonight.


	2. Chapter 2

PART TWO

Mulder was already half asleep as Scully drove them both back into town. He wondered just how close he had come to finding a fully intact giant skeleton and started thinking about the myriad ways to find the bones of Nancy Archer. A Geiger counter might detect her bones if there was any residual radiation on them and then there were cadaver-sensing dogs. He didn't know the name of the machines, but he also knew there were devices that used sound waves to read what was under the ground.

"What are those things that can read objects under the ground?" He asked.

"Metal detectors?" Scully responded.

"No," Mulder tried to think. "The things that use sound waves which bounce off anomalous objects underground."

"Mulder," Dana Scully rolled her eyes. "I want you to think about this logically. First off, there is no way for the human body to grow that big. It's just not built for it. She'd have a heart attack before she would reach twenty feet. Two, there's no way she would be able to stand. You're talking about the weight of an object multiplied height times width times thickness. She'd be almost forty-five tons if she'd reach fifty feet tall; she'd be barely able to stand."

"I know the physics for it actually happening is incredible." Mulder replied. "But the account of the incident has been reported. Over thirty people reported and testified to it."

"Mulder," Scully was still looking for signs of life as she wondered where the town was or if she was even driving in the right direction. "This is a small town. You probably can't take what they say as literal. They probably saw a parade balloon or heavy machinery run amuck. You can't be certain of what really happened thirty years ago."

"Who is going to make up a story about a giant woman?"

"Ambrose Bierce made up a story about a man vanishing in a field before witnesses." His partner answered back. "For three years after his book was published, communities from Gallatin, Tennessee to South Bend, Indiana started reporting their own missing people cases. All it takes is a person with an imagination."

Mulder braced his head silently on the window. He tried to the name of the man who had been hit by radiation that also grew to spectacular size. Was it Glen Manning or Glen Danning? As he tried to remind himself, Scully turned off the dirt road to the highway. As she did, her eyes checked for traffic for a few seconds as she turned the wheel to pull out on to the lonely country road. It was obviously late as she realized there was no other traffic. She and her partner truly felt alone way out here as the woods and fields around them whirled past the car. She then pulled her jacket a bit to keep her safety belt from restraining her. It felt tight as her eyes noticed her sleeve had pulled back two inches from her watch. Its band was tight around her wrist as it suddenly popped and fell to her feet under the seat. That wasn't right she thought. A creepy feeling came over her as she looked to Mulder and hoped he hadn't noticed that. Her eyes then started rounding fearfully as she felt her blouse actually growing tight on her as she looked down and noticed both of the straps on both her shoes actually pop open at the same time. This couldn't be happening to her! She glanced from the road in front of her, clenched the wheel a bit and tensed up as she felt numerous runs pop through her panty hose from her crotch and shoot down her legs to the gas pedals. The seam of her skirt under the belt popped and unraveled as it snapped apart. She felt her breasts becoming prisoners of her bra as her straps slapped from under her clothes and then a button pop off the front of her blouse. The zipper on the back of her skirt exploded under her seat as she continued driving and realizing what was happening to her. She glanced to Mulder as he lightly dozed and then stirred himself awake and turned to her.

"There's a chicken place up here on the corner if it's still op… Jesus Christ!" Mulder turned to her as he noticed her head touching the roof of the car. Her jacket looked as if it were made for a kid as it ripped at the shoulder as the car skidded to an immediate stop.

"This...cannot be..." Scully was slowly sinking into shock and disbelief as she felt her clothes actually trying to escape from her. "...Happening!" She stammered halfway into shock as her partner froze and then fought and fumbled with the door as he fought to get out of the car. What could he do! Sit and watch with a coke and box of popcorn as his partner started out-growing her clothes!

"I hate it when I'm right." He mumbled as he fought to get the door to pop open. Still tangled in his seat belt, he could only watch as Scully quickly began to outgrow her seat and her clothing. She was too much in shock to scream and say anything else. Mulder continued fighting with his doorway wondering if the pressure already on the car was keeping it from opening. The car around him was going to be his tomb as his partner broke from her shock to scream one word.

"No!"

Mulder woke with a start in his motel room. The images of his dream were still a bit vivid for him as he sat up and tried to compose himself. Still clad in his shirt and pants, he thought he had just sat laid down on the top of his bed to rest a bit and watch TV, but he must have fallen asleep. Cartoons were now running on the TV as he swung his legs over the edge of the bed and felt for his shoes to pull them back on. The morning sunlight was streaming through the windows of the room as he sat up in his wrinkled clothing and reached for his jacket and shoulder harness on the chair by the bed. The whole room was lit up with shades of gray and orange as he tried to feel human once more. He checked to see if he had enough cash in his wallet to buy breakfast for himself.

The faint image of Scully still rested on his brain from the dream as he struggled with the sleeve of his jacket. He closed the door to his room and started across the courtyard of the motel for Scully's room on the other side. Police sirens and emergency vehicles were rushing around the block as he wondered if he should tell his partner about the dream. He lifted his curled fingers and knocked on the door of her room as it fell to the floor inside. Mulder's eyes lifted up as he saw the devastation inside it and beyond. The back of her motel room had been blown open to the Laundromat behind it. Both the back walls of both the buildings had been blown away and there was an obvious wide opening in the ceiling and roof as if something had exploded from within Scully's room. He tried to think rationally as he wondered if his dream was not that far-fetched after all.


	3. Chapter 3

Sheriff Charlie Spooner had been the law in Hitchcock since Sheriff Dubbitt had retired in 1972. A short graying man with thin glasses, he stood in the wreckage of the old Laundromat and stared out the back of it into the open motel room behind it. Something had taken out a good half of both structures and nearly both roofs. Whatever it was that had caused the destruction had not left much of a trace of whatever it was. Spooner knocked a piece of wreckage with his foot out of the water spilling the floor as a few pipes stopped spraying.

"I guess the water department finally got my message." He commented as he noticed Fox Mulder wandering through from the motel. "Sir, I can't let you in here."

"Fox Mulder, government agent." Mulder flashed his identification. "Can you tell me what happened?"

"Water boiler exploded." Spooner replied distantly as he eyed the agent. "Anything I missed?"

"Yes," Mulder gestured through the former back of the Laundromat to the missing back room of the structure parallel with Scully's now open motel room. "My partner was in the room in the motel right across the alley. I was wanting to know if she had been in it when the Laundromat exploded, that is, if it exploded."

"You have anything you really want to tell me." Spooner pulled Mulder out of the way of the contractor checking the damage for the accident report. The stout and balding figure removed his glasses to wipe the steam off with his shirt, groused about his wet feet and then closed his waterproof legal pad.

"Charlie," Carl Williams had lived in Hitchcock all his life. His father had opened the Bar and Grill in 1958 and did construction jobs on the side. "I can't figure out what caused the boiler to explode. Only thing I can determine is that it was hit with a piece of blunt trauma, but whether it was from the explosion or after is hard to tell."

"Did anyone see a giant woman?" Mulder asked.

"Aw, jiminy cricket…" Sheriff Spooner mumbled and tugged Mulder out of the way as Carl continued looking for something he missed. "I thought you said you was a FBI agent. You're one of those damn paranormal researchers, ain't ya?"

"Sheriff…"

"Look," Spooner continued. "It's been nearly more than forty years since Mrs. Archer died. She died. That's it. Nothing more. She didn't become no stinking…"

"Sheriff," Mulder started at him offensively. "I am with the FBI and I am here trying to confirm the veracity of the urban legend over Nancy Archer's death. If you would just follow my reasoning, I think my partner might have contacted whatever she might have been overwhelmed from back in 1957."

"You've been out on the old Fowler estate?" Charlie sneered exasperatingly. "Well, you're glad I didn't catch you out there. I'd have run you in, agent or not."

"Sheriff…"

"It's been a long time, agent." Spooner stood a bit shorter than Mulder. "No one wants to recall it. You're not going to find anyone who wants to recall anything. It never happened."

"Did anyone see the boiler explode?"

"No one."

"Three kids across the street." Carl looked up.

"Out after curfew…" Charlie replied. "And before you ask," He turned to Mulder. "It was a dark cloudy night. And before you ask, they didn't see any giant lady."

Mulder narrowed his eyes as sheriff Spooner turned to warn Carl from talking out of turn again. Stepping through the wrecked wall around old washing machines lying face down on the tile floor, he placed his foot into the remains of the maintenance room in back of the Laundromat. The path took him through the alley and into the opening of Scully's motel room. Sections of wall mixed with loose and broken bricks littered around him as he stooped to inspect the wall. It had been shattered neatly like a disassembled puzzle in both directions. Reaching for his cell phone, he looked to the sheriff and the contractor talking in hushed tones and then punched a few buttons on his cell. He tried to picture what it might have been like for her to discover her body physically increasing in size and her clothes shredding apart on her. She would have been terrified and scared out of her wits; maybe even desperate to get out of sight, but where could she hide? An empty warehouse? An old barn?

"Skinner, here…" The voice of his superior came from the phone.

"Chief," Mulder started. "I've got an…"

"Mulder," Walter Skinner removed his glasses irritatingly and responded. "What the heck are you doing in Hitchcock, California? Scully better be dragging you back on an airplane."

"Chief…" Mulder surveyed the wreckage space trying to judge how big Scully might have become. "I was going through the old files and I came out here to do a follow-up, and right now, I don't know where Scully is."

"You better not be telling me she was abducted."

"Nothing quite so believable…" Mulder pulled Scully's ruined torn jacket out from under the shattered back brickwall behind the motel.


	4. Chapter 4

A dark gray government helicopter from Twenty Nine Palms Marine Base nearby was soon hovering over Hitchcock, California. A few pedestrians looked up to the military issue craft as it crossed over at two hundred feet up and started descending close to the field behind local library. Mulder just cocked his head upward with narrowed eyes and his short hair thrashing in the down current from the copter's blades. It landed twenty feet from him like a metallic metal beast from prehistory and even before the blades shut off, a side hatch popped open and FBI Director Walter Skinner poked one leg out for the ground and then swung his other leg out with it. Looking up to Mulder, an exasperated sigh came from him drowned out by the helicopter.

"Okay," He started. "You want to tell me how an agent can vanish looking for the agent she was sent to locate while that missing agent pops up out of no where in her absence."

"I think she was most likely affected by residuals of extra-terrestrial, possibly paranormal, energies of a radioactive nature that affected her molecular nature and resulted in a body wide alteration to her cellular composition and overall physical stature." Mulder spoke casually as the helicopter engine died down and its pilot and co-pilot checked their instruments. His hand pressed a manila envelope into Skinner's direction. "October 14, 1958 – Nancy Archer reported observation of a ball of light resembling a quantum causality in space descend into the road before her car and then the image of a vast humanoid presence reaching for her. She fled only to return to the exact location less than an hour later with her husband and the local sheriff."

"Flying saucer?" Skinner read the original account written by a former agent from the 1950s named Arthur Dales.

"Technically, a flying orb reported by Archer as a hundred feet wide." Mulder continued. "There was nothing to be found when she returned, but according to her manservant, she took her husband out to look for it again, only this time she didn't come back. Her husband, Harry Archer, was initially believed as having killed her and dumping her remains, but then she mysteriously appeared on the grounds of the family estate, unconscious with scratches in her throat and her necklace missing. Her family doctor thought she had radiation poisoning, but the incident took on more… bizarre nature as she swelled in size to fifty feet in height."

"What's this all got to do with Agent Scully's whereabouts?"

"I think she was affected in the same way by the residual energies of that craft left behind on Nancy Archer's body buried under covert conditions on a portion of her property." Mulder continued. "I have Mrs. Archer's death certificate, but the papers on where she was buried have never been filed." He turned and looked from the incline down from the hospital looking over the second floor roofs of town. The finger of his left hand extended to the direction of the motel two blocks away. "Last night, an unidentified explosion took out the back of Scully's motel room and the adjoining back of a Laundromat behind it. The perimeter of the explosion measures nineteen feet: the same width of Scully's room and the appropriate size for a woman of Scully's size increased to fifty feet tall."

"Mulder…" Skinner and his agent took a walk parallel from the helicopter. "Have you ever heard of a newspaper editor named Tony Vinchenzo? He ran a newspaper in Chicago called the Independent News Service and he had this crackpot reporter named Carl Kolchak…"

"I read Kolchak's column in the Chicago Tribune." Mulder confessed.

"I should have known." Skinner exhaled a bit and lowered the Archer file by his side. "Kolchak was constantly twisting these extra-ordinary events into incredible stories and it did nothing but get him in trouble with law enforcement agencies in five states along with the FBI, the CIA and Military Intelligence. You remind me a lot… a lot of him. You're supposed to examine the veracity of these tales, but yet, you've got it into your head they're proof of otherworldly encounters."

"Nancy Archer wasn't the only case like this." Mulder stopped, took the file from Skinner and leafed through it. "May, 28, 1959 – military officers on maneuvers near Candy Rock, Colorado reported seeing a saucer-shaped craft speeding into the sky. An hour later, a gigantic figure resembling local Emmeline Raven-Pinsetter was witnessed by two hundred and fifty-eight witnesses coming through town and vanishing into the desert. Two hours after the sightings, she came out of the desert quite normal and quite debilitated for experience. Her and her husband are still within the government's Witness Protection Program.

"Hainesville, Ohio, June 12, 1965, not one sighting but several of descriptions of at least six different gigantic individuals supposedly terrorizing the town." Mulder continued. "The local sheriff was so annoyed by the reports that he called the governor to send the state police to help him escort the individuals out of town, but by then, these reported terrorists were down to a more manageable size. On February 25, 2000 of last year, there were twelve unconfirmed reports of a woman of tremendous size in Captain's Stu's Funland in Santa Clarita, California…"

"Mulder, do you have a thing for giant women?" Skinner asked the question.

"Glen Manning…"

"Glen Manning never existed." Skinner's tone slightly changed.

"Then why does the Pentagon have a sealed file on this non-existent man from Nellis Air Force Base?" Mulder wanted to know. "Why did the United States Military relocate or imprison seventy-three people from Las Vegas and Crucero, Mexico from 1957 to 1960?" Mulder briefly looked away exasperatedly and then looked back once more to his superior. "Even if you ignore the incredible aspects of these cases, we are faced with reports of cover-ups of incidents that the government considers the public is not ready to accept. Since when has the Pentagon forbid us from records connected to a case? When are we going to open our eyes and realize just what the evidence is telling us instead of what we are being told what to believe? Agent Dana Scully is missing and I am convinced beyond shadow of a doubt that her disappearance is tied to events that have been cloaked behind rumor and time, time to affect the memories of witnesses."

"There's one glaring hole in your theory and evidence…" Skinner blinked a few times tiredly. "Where does a fifty-foot tall woman hide?"

"Anywhere she wants to…" Mulder cracked out loud.


	5. Chapter 5

PART FIVE

The western rim of the former Fowler Estate sped by underneath Mulder as he and Skinner searched the area for Agent Dana Scully. The military copter was carrying them at a height of 100 to 200 feet over the environs below and then within view of the old Fowler Estate, now a deserted and largely abandoned reputed haunted house since the details of the supposed heart attack of Nancy Archer in 1958. Mulder was sure he knew the truth. She possibly was living proof of a long history of extra-terrestrial visits happening on for over five hundred years on the planet. After all, there was no earthly way for an attractive thirty-eight year old woman such as Nancy Archer to grow to fifty feet tall. Even if her gigantic existence could be covered up by the government to protect a seemingly unprepared general public, there were the word of mouth stories and tales passed from father to son and mother to daughter. These tales could be exaggerated over several years, but the original version of the tale was certainly there.

"A few more minutes," Skinner studied a local map on the seat. "And we'll be getting closer to Fairvale. There's a swamp out there where a large body could submerge to conceal itself."

"Submerging a large body would displace a tremendous amount of water." Mulder spoke as loud as he could under the loud reverberation of the helicopter engine and blades. "Force a lot of overflow into creeks, streams and sewer systems along with a fair amount of flooding." He looked back out the small window as trees raced by under him. Light reflected skyward from a creek down under him. "Maybe if we circle round to…"

"Sir…" The pilot spoke though the intercom. "What do you think would do that?"

Skinner and Mulder looked out the starboard side of the craft together. Down below them was a neat and orderly row of electrical lines crossing alongside the highway below, but then they came across a break in the line and two adjoining wood posts snapped off close to the ground. Down below them, the snapped power line was cracking and snapping against the asphalt road. The pole tips with their support beams and transformers were laying haphazardly on the ground as so much trash. It looked as if a massive presence had broken through a simple fence.

"Judging from the direction from the motel," Mulder checked the map of Hitchcock. "I think we should hang east toward the San Bernardino Mountains. There are a lot of large ravines and gullies and even mountain lakes for someone to hide for a long time."

"Follow the creek below us…" Skinner told the pilot. "It has a clearing through the tress for a large presence to maneuver through. We could make the…" The craft around them suddenly jarred forward and back hard as if it had snagged on one of the coniferous trees dotting below their line of sight. The pilot grabbed the stick hard to try and stay level while Mulder and Skinner thrashed from side to side. Skinner's glasses flung from his head, but his ears heard the copter blades scraping mountainside and earth and then bending and snapping off the wing mast. Everything tilted back and left for them and shook furiously from the storm of vibrations tearing through the helicopter. The engines coughed out from the stress to it. Mulder grabbed a hand brace and pulled himself up to look out and see what they had hit. He saw the ground deep below them, open air and then darkness after a flash of almost white surroundings. The repercussions caused the pilot to fly out through the front windows by sheer force. It was almost as if they were being shaken like a kid's toy.

"Stop…. Looking for me!!" Scully's voice emanated from somewhere as if it was coming through a vast loudspeaker. Skinner lifted himself up to look up over the seats of the cockpit forward through the front of the copter. First he thought he was seeing a billboard with a six to seven foot wide face on it, but upon replacing his glasses, it became more dimensional and even more incredibly detail and sculpted. He didn't know what to say. As a normal woman, Scully was a beautiful woman, but increased twenty to thirty more times, she appeared godly, almost immortal, practically worthy of worship.

"Scully…" Mulder tried to stand in the confined passenger compartment and called out to her. "We can help you! Return you to normal!"

"I'm not going back!" Steam from her mighty lungs filled the ravaged craft and turned it into a sweatbox. "I'm STAYING this way! I like it!!" Her eyes flared a bit. Her irises contacted noticeably toward them.

"Agent Scully!" Skinner cried out himself. "You are not thinking rationally! Whatever has happened has affected your mind! You can't possibly…" Her face vanished as the disabled craft tilted backward and dumped the two agents on their backs into the back wall. From one window was complete darkness while sunlight came from the other window. The helicopter was being held upright by its tail. Mulder and Skinner together slammed against one wall hard atop each other and then flung back against the other side hard again. Hitting the starboard side once more, Skinner knocked the side hatch open and struck what first seemed to be the side of the cliff before plummeting thirty feet to the ground. Mulder lifted his gaze up and realized it was his partner's bare abdomen, now more than twenty feet wide and filling the complete opening with a three foot wide hole in the middle of her abdominal region that was her navel. It was his complete view of the extremity of her new size for a brief few seconds before he saw open sky whirling over him and the crash of the helicopter hitting water. He had been hurled into a lake! Water rushed up through the cockpit fast and unmercilessly while he hastened to escape his metal tomb. The side of the copter rolled under the surface of the water and began sinking with him in it.

Mulder's head flung himself awake again. Blinking his eyes several times, he turned his head scowling toward Skinner studying the map of rural Hitchcock and rubbed his head. Skinner looked to him with a parental look and looked him over.

"Mulder," He spoke calmly. "When was the last time you had a full seven hours of sleep?"

"Seven straight hours?"

"I guess that answers my question." Skinner glanced the map over again. "We'll be getting closer to Fairvale. Sheriff Spooner called the local state police and told them to keep an eye out for our agent."

"I think I saw something." Mulder had noticed trees moving and shaking. Several tree tips were shaking from the wind in the helicopter down thrust, but the thrashing he saw had been from something closer to the ground. It was almost as if something down below was forcing itself through the trees.

"Pilot, turn left ten degrees…" He requested. The craft turned and started heading toward the massive activity. A tree had toppled over in the turn and Mulder was struggling to see well. Skinner secured his safety line to keep from falling out and pulled the side-boarding hatch open to look down. As they cocked their eyes earthward, they looked the fifty feet down upon a massive orange earth-borer. It was clearing a plot of land. Construction men and a contractor reared their heads up to the helicopter above them. Sheriff Charlie Spooner even waved from the road as he stood watching the construction. Skinner's cell phone rang as he waved back with a friendly grin.

"There's a ravine over here." Mulder picked up the map. "I think that if we just…"

"Mulder," Skinner held up his phone. "It's for you."

"Who'd be calling me on your phone?" Mulder took his cell phone and pressed it to his ear. "Mulder, here…"

"Mulder, where the heck are you this time?!" The voice of Agent Dana Scully asked him point blank.


	6. Chapter 6

PART SIX

Looking from down below the helicopter, Mulder noticed gusts of hurricane proportions blowing from the downdraft of the helicopter. Grass and tree branches shook and stirred furiously in the down breeze and loose litter on the ground took wind. The large craft was setting down on a private airfield for crop-dusters, the closest civilian landing space to the Air Force Base. A few farmers and hotshot pilots looked out to see the huge military helicopter set ground this close to town. Among the witnesses and rare on-lookers was the fare attractive form of Dana Scully, all five feet and seven inches of her. Her dark green blazer jostled open to her black blouse as she put her hand to her head to shield her eyes to the minute debris being blown around. The vast pinnacle of mechanical and computer evolution had landed and was powering down just as a lock was undone, a latch switched in place and the side entrance of the copter was slid open by the director of the FBI. Walter Skinner looked to his errant female image to confirm her presence and then back to his embarrassed male agent in the seat behind him ready to start screaming, but no, that would not start right now. It was too soon.

"That's funny," Skinner remarked with frustrated sarcasm. "She doesn't look fifty feet tall."

"Director Skinner," Dana stepped forward from her rental car and toward her superior. "I don't understand. What's going on here? Is there a problem?"

"Agent," Skinner exhaled frustratedly. "Where have you been for the last eighteen hours?"

"Fairview," Dana answered matter-of-factly. "A Laundromat boiler exploded during an attempted robbery and a young girl was impaled by shrapnel. The best medical facility is in Fairview and I had to keep my heart on the girl's chest to keep her from bleeding to death."

"Laundromat…." Mulder mumbled under breath.

"And you couldn't check in with me?" Her superior asked the question.

"Sir," Dana looked away for the moment, clearing her throat and posturing a bit as she shifted her weight to her other leg. "This is a small town, they don't have cell phone towers. Would that I could, I would have been in contact, but it was a matter of a girl's life."

Skinner turned round with an annoyed gaze to one of his agents, and it wasn't Scully.

"Mulder," Scully pushed her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket. "Did you drag Skinner out here to confirm another crackpot theory?"

"Well, I, uh, needed the authority to get a helicopter."

"You needed a helicopter to find me?" Scully raised her eyebrows and lowered her head in utter disbelief.

"Did he get to the point where he thought you were fifty feet tall and naked?" Skinner stood behind Mulder with his arms crossed in frustrated annoyance. Dana blinked twice wondering if she had heard him correctly and slowly panned back to Mulder.

"I never once said the word naked." He tried to excuse his hasty rush to judgement.

"Mulder, have you ever considered talking to a psychiatrist?" She slipped last into the driver's seat of the rental car and started it up to head back to the airport, leaving the military helicopter behind to catch a passenger flight back to DC. Sheriff Charlie Spooner meanwhile waved to the agents passing by him. His eyes watched as their car turned the corner round Nick's Bar And Grill and then turned back to the garbage truck lifting and dumping the trash dumpster behind him. The metallic arms of the truck shook the dumpster once to empty it, and then started lowering it like a giant metal praying mantis holding its prey. As the dumpster lowered back into place, Charlie made sure that it landed just right to obscure the sight of the oversized footprints imbedded in the asphalt in the alley left behind by the late Nancy Archer.

END


End file.
